Piesse's The Art of Perfumery is an important early book about the methodology behind extraction methods and blending in perfumery. It is considered Piesse's "opus magnum".  In the book, Piesse introduces the idea that olfaction can be described in ways that correlate to the musical notes on a diatonic scale. He is credited with creating an "odaphone," or a scale related to categorizing and ranking the notes by octave. The Art of Perfumery is also notable in that, in an 1862 edition, Piesse introduced ideas relating to synesthesia and smound. He suggested that sounds and scents are linked in the brain: "Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees." One of The Art of Perfumery's most enduring legacies is Piesse's popularization of the use of synthetic materials.

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